Quite liked The Reckless Moment--though I have to admit I preferred Goran Visnjic in the remake (The Deep End) to James Mason, but otherwise I prefer the original.

*Letter from an Unknown Woman* is one of my favorites, but it's not for everyone: it's a sentimental weepie. So elegant and beautiful. Scorsese talks about it (and shows my favorite scene) in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (in which he kinda shows the best scenes from a lot of movies--lots of spoilers).

Earrings of Madame de... has a great rep. I'd love to check that out--thanks for reminding me!

after years of only having seen and Letter from an Unknown Woman, my friend showed me prints of Reckless Moment & Caught! the rest I'm going to have to see before the month is out. unbelievably pathological.

these are only 'weepies' in the way that Fassbinder makes weepies, in fact the definite unbroken line goes from Max Ophuls to Douglas Sirk to Fassbinder

saw Earrings of Madame De.... I hadn't done a bit of research and had no idea it was in French. Reckless Moment & Caught! are such full-blooded American films, some of the gangsters are cruel enough to foreshadow 50's Sam Fuller films, so I wasn't ready for how relentlessly elegant this world was going to be

maybe his most unlikable characters? and yet the sheer volume of little emotional details keeps coming at you so quickly that by the end, you're inside all three of their heads and there's no way out

saw the other three late French films this weekend. Le Plaisir is beautiful, the middle story perhaps drags a bit but the opening & closing are just relentless eye candy, the camera movements & sets are so beautiful you just keep melting. Lola Montes, big epic spectacle & likeably meta -- maybe it left me a little cold, but the current unrestored DVD is so washed out I shouldn't even claim I've seen it.

but Le Ronde killed me, I was unprepared for something so self-conscious or sexed up, you usually don't get both done equally well: 10 episodes where a couple gets together, connected by one of the characters wandering off, vaguely discontent to dreamily encounter their next partner. the opening five minute unbroken shot of Anton Walbrook omnisciently addressing the audience on a stage, walking off the stage past the film cameras into 1900's Vienna, singing a song and then giving acting directions to the first character: 'you are a prostitute, and your first client of the night will be the sixth man who turns that corner'... this film wastes no time. At another point Anton takes out a scissors and edits the 35mm film strip to change the scene you're watching, smiling at the camera and whispering 'censorship!'. Buñuel must have been thinking of this film when making The Phantom of Liberty, and this film is just as surreal, but far more romantic. It doesn't come off as experimental though, it's pure fun and it evidently did the best box office of his later films.

Very different from Unknown Woman, but probably my favorite after that one, though I've liked every single one so far.

Phantom of Liberty = my sentimentally favorite Buñuel and I'm sort of actively miffed that I didn't know about Le Ronde, I done been missing out

The earlier film that comes to mind with Le Ronde is Lubitsch's One Hour With You from 1931, as a pre-code Hollywood film its subject matter is just as randy, and while Maurice Chevalier's habit of directly addressing the audience came from theatre, when it occurs on an early talkie movie screen it seems shockingly modern.

definitely, watching all those endlessly smooth, swooping & gliding tracking shots in La Ronde and Le Plaisir makes it clear how much Kubrick ripped from Ophuls. all these breakaway sets where the camera quickly follows people through walls, through windows, up two flights of stairs...

not just jumping out the window -- starts with her eyes glazing over, the camera pulling back from a wide shot containing both of them to suddenly -become- a POV shot as she runs up three flights of stairs, unlocks the window, and then the camera follows her three stories down and through the plate glass Terrarium ceiling.

Saw Lola Montes recently, right in the middle of a Ken Russell binge, and it seemed to fit right in, prefiguring not just Russell, but late Fellini and lots of their 60's and 70's contemporaries: wild, colorful, sexy, satirical, and with that anti-realistic, theatrical presentation.

Peter Ustinoff was great -one of those films when you see an actor who wound up getting paid just to turn up and be themselves, and suddenly realize how they established themselves in that position.

La Ronde is flat-out incredible. So funny, joyous, humane, knowing, brilliant and inevitable. It's both the best movie about venereal disease and one of the best about the transience of affection I could imagine existing. And the way it becomes less magical, more matter-of-fact as the movie goes on (the MC reduced from Chaucerian mysticism to just a passing observer) betrays the ultimate truth of these hookups. It's like walking out of Wonderland. Sorry, waltzing. Incredible film. And the imagery throughout is perfection itself.

Finally watched The Reckless Moment in an awful YouTube upload this morning. It's not of the first rank, but the bank accounts executive, pawnbroker, bartender, and post office employee are well-drawn, and Ophuls helps Joan Bennett interact with them and their spaces in a way that makes the community live.

Just watched Madame de..., my first Ophuls. The story never generates the empathy I want and expect from my melodrama; certainly the fact that Boyer's is by far the most purely likeable character diverts our sympathies from the heroine. But my god, what a gorgeous film! I almost felt like I could have watched it without the subtitles and just luxuriated in the imagery. The time-spanning dance sequence, in particular, is something worthy of Welles.

Does it? That's a point worth pondering, for from the start (I've watched this movie about 10 times) my sympathies were with Boyer, and they've deepened. If anything, the film's on his side: he's the more complex one, ready to accept their arrangement as "superficially superficial" because Louise insisted on these terms, as he makes clear. He'll tolerate flirtations, the consummation of a love affair even, so long as she doesn't play him for a sucker in public.

Interesting. I like the idea of the film being on Boyer's side, though I do think that the presentation, particularly in the last 45 mins or so (roughly from the time Louise leaves for Italy), encourages an identification with Louise. I dunno, though; perhaps I'm forcing a reading of the film that is in keeping with the conventions of melodrama. It probably doesn't help that I just started reading Lauren Berlant's The Female Complaint (on melodrama and sentimentality in American culture, with what looks to be a fair bit devoted to Golden Age-era film) and that this is where my mind is at right now (I didn't time the starting the book and watching the film at the same time; it was just Madame's turn in my PVR queue). The "superficially superficial" arrangement certainly complicates things, though, in that it renders Louise far more ambiguous than the usual sentimental heroine.

I don't develop a rooting interest in film like this (except for everyone to get their heart broken, since they will)... unless the deck is reslly stacked, like against Joan Fontaine in Letter from an Unknown Woman. (And the Jourdan character is even worse in the Stefan Zweig novella.)

went to a double feature of 'lola montes' (which i'd not seen before - admired it more than loved it) and a fairly beat-up/badly subtitled print of 'liebelei' (1933) tonight. marcel ophuls (who turns 90 this year and who worked on LM) did a q&a in-between the films. choicest quote: "my father didn't love courtesans, he loved whores"

Some essayists have felt that Ophuls completely identified with his heroine and expected the same of his audience. It’s true he shared with his female characters a feeling of displacement, an alienation from the culture at large. Their preoccupation with fate and chance give their stories an air of ephemerality....

In watching it again, I find that Stefan has become every bit Lisa’s equal, a vividly imagined lost soul as captivating as he is heartbreaking. Hardly less poignant though with little screen time are the son, Stefan Jr. (Leo B. Pessin), and the husband (Marcel Journet), one of those military men (like Charles Boyer in Madame de) whose conventional views and demeanor mask an obvious depth of feeling. Johann represents correct society, but also the ideals of duty and obligation, by no means trivial. He even married her with the full knowledge of her affair and the child’s parentage. Indeed, she will be urging the boy to call Johann Father even as she is leaving him forever, leaving a ten-year-old Stefan who needs and can appreciate her love for the adult and dissipated Stefan who can’t. And here’s the crux of it: if Stefan repeatedly fails to see her clearly, fails to recognize her as the savior who might redeem his life and vocation, so she fails to appreciate the unlikelihood of his transformation, and especially the depth of his degradation at the end. Rarely has the nature of love as fantasy been so richly understood or so exquisitely expressed.